All trade is based upon new needs brought on as a result of new technology—the advent of long term human habitats over the old style of hunting and gathering brought about the need for trading for items which were not or could not be autonomously made. The need to establish a new type of trading process, beyond the barter system, brought about an establishment of a medium of exchange (e.g., money). This has evolved over the ages into modern day commerce with monetary exchanges, stock markets, supermarkets, gas stations, flea markets, swap meets, etc. However, many of the globally employed systems may not be as efficient, or as fair as possible, since they rely on third party interaction or are based around a set market style or process. The utopian vision of a marketplace would be where the utility of the marketplace allowed for an individual to achieve the most efficient and advantageous level of transaction negotiation, fairest market value, protected and guaranteed clearing for a commodity or service.
Ancient people invented money by placing fixed values on certain items such as shells, beads, stones, and even salt, with ingots being the most common form of money. Ingots were clumps of precious metal in no particular shape or size with their worth depending on their mineral content and weight. Their value was high because these metals were hard to find and difficult to mine. Ingots were not a panacea, though, and posed some problems for merchants even after being weighed. The greatest of these was determining true value because the content and purity of ingots varied. A partial solution for this dilemma was solved by stamping them with seals. Each seal displayed a description of the metal content, as well as a declaration of its weight. Even with the use of seals, unscrupulous traders would shave some of the metal off the ingot from the opposite side from the seal, thus depreciating the value. Despite these incipient problems associated with development, the world monetary system has evolved from ingots and ancient coinage to wire transfers, debit and credit cards and from primitive barter to currency exchanges, stock markets and intertwined global markets.
The Internet and world wide web (WWW) provide the first true continuous world wide communications structure open to the individual. This allows for new ways to address global commerce. There are several different methods in which commerce may be implemented as there are a vast variety of commodities and services that are in need of being traded. The concept of using the Internet as a marketplace or auction forum is not particularly unique or difficult of an endeavor. The current technology of using E-mail and a telephone for notification employed by existing firms in closed environments has a rather low entry threshold of complexity. This method can be duplicated quite easily and has limited or no room for evolution. However, digital technology lends itself quite readily to real-time high-volume transactions made by multiple participants using shared information. Businesses are moving to digital technologies and this leads to a need to invent new technology and processes to fill the utility.
Commerce systems over the Internet are known in the art. Most of these systems operate on a post and match process; that is, the systems work by having a prospective buyer bid on an item, and if the bid matches the seller's specified selling price, the item is sold to the buyer. The bid and notification may not be processed in real time. Additionally, the seller does not have the ability to intervene once the exchange process has been initiated—once the offer for sale or exchange is made, the seller is isolated from the transaction until it is complete.
Previous networked commerce systems do not allow a user to bid automatically on an item. Thus, in order to stay apprised of what is being offered for sale, a person or a representative would have to remain on the network constantly. Additionally, most systems require participants to be registered members of a system where sellers may be restricted only to merchants, and most rely on credit card transactions. It is difficult for a prospective buyer to search for the exact item that he is looking for without a considerable input of time. Finally, in systems that involve the sale of stocks, operations are still routed through a brokerage firm, and the system itself is essentially an order placing service.